History of Law

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that a 'right to explanation' of decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems will be legally mandated by the GDPR. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive limited information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a 'right to be informed'. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the 'right not to be subject to automated decision-making' contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged 'right to explanation' stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018.

This article has two main purposes. The first is to provide an introduction to Santi Romano's seminal work L'ordinamento giuridico, first published in 1917, in which the author develops the main tenets of his thought, namely institutionalism and pluralism. The first part of this essay accordingly provides an outline of Romano's theories; this account is intended to be sufficiently robust to benefit an English-speaking readership for which there is still no translated version of L'ordinamento giuridico available. Embedded within the overview of Romano's theories is a discussion of the criticism they have attracted and the influence they had on Romano's contemporaries, and to that extent this first part constitutes a contribution to the history of ideas. The second purpose is to assess the relevance of Romano's theories for the current study of international, transnational and global law. It is argued that Romano's particular conception of law as an institution can be helpful in the current debate on the unity and systematisation of international law, whereas his reflections on the plurality of legal orders contained early kernels of insight for present-day research on the fragmentation of international law and the rise of atypical global governance regimes.

This paper examines the first moments of the emergence of “psychometrics” as a discipline, using a history of the Binet-Simon test (precursor to the Stanford-Binet) to engage the question of how intelligence became a “psychological object.”  To begin to answer this, we used a previously-unexamined set of French texts to highlight the negotiations and collaborations that led Alfred Binet (1857-1911) to identify “mental testing” as a research area worth pursuing.  This included a long-standing rivalry with Désiré-Magloire Bourneville (1840-1909), who argued for decades that psychiatrists ought to be the professional arbiters of which children would be removed from the standard curriculum and referred to special education classes in asylums. In contrast, Binet sought to keep children in schools and conceived of a way for psychologists to do this.  Supported by the Société libre de l’étude psychologique de l’enfant [Free society for the psychological study of the child], and by a number of collaborators and friends, he thus undertook to create a “metric” scale of intelligence—and the associated testing apparatus—to legitimize the role of psychologists in a to-that-point psychiatric domain: identifying and treating “the abnormal.” The result was a change in the earlier law requiring all healthy French children to attend school, between the ages of 6 and 13, to recognize instead that otherwise normal children sometimes need special help: they are “slow” (arriéré), but not “sick.”  This conceptualization of intelligence was then carried forward, through the test’s influence on Lewis Terman (1877-1956) and Lightner Witmer (1867-1956), to shape virtually all subsequent thinking about intelligence testing and its role in society. [Open access; feel free to share widely.]

The article takes a close look at Jacob Grimm's astonishing account of measurement in his lesser-known studies on the history of law. Grimm gives a thorough description of concrete quantification of property and the measurement of economic value in a European rural setting. Both techniques are considered a necessary 'infrastructure' for any use of money, yet his exposition is curiously devoid of numbers. Instead, 'poetic' and procedural scripts of measurement take center stage. However, these qualitative procedures are not contrasted to quantitative ones in any expectable way. In Grimm's polemic, precise quantification emerges as a shorthand for administrative regimes that circumvent and prohibit negotiation, appearing to be less rational and more socially binding.

Explaining what made ancient Greek law unusual, Michael Gagarin observes that most premodern legal cultures "wrote extensive sets (or codes) of laws for academic purposes or propaganda but these were not intended to be accessible to most members of the community and had relatively little effect on the actual operation of the legal system."  This article addresses the implications of writing for customary or regional law in South and Southeast Asia.  The textual tradition of Dharmaśāstra ("Hindu law"), which canonizes a particular model of Brahmin customary norms,  can certainly be called a "scholarly" exercise, and it was also intended as propaganda for the Brahmanical cosmopolitan world order. But it also formulated a procedural principle to recognize the general validity of other, even divergent, customary norms, though for the most part such rules remained lex non scripta.  On the other hand, inscriptions provide evidence that writing was used for diverse legal purposes and offers glimpses of actual legal practice.  In these records, customary laws are sometimes laid down as statutes by decree of a ruler or community body, or are simply invoked as long-established customary rules.  But even when Dharmaśāstra texts are not directly cited, their influence over the longue durée is discernable in the persistence of śāstric legal categories and terms of art.  This influence is even more evident in Java, where legal codes on the Dharmaśāstra model were composed in Javanese, and where the inscriptions came to exhibit a closer connection with śāstric discourse than is found in India.

The Theses LVI belong to a series of hitherto unpublished early manuscripts of the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) that were acquired by the University of Leiden in 1864. It is not certain when the Theses were written, but preliminary research on the physical manuscript and the sources cited indicate two possible windows. The first is around 1602-1605, that is roughly at a time when Grotius was also working on his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty (De Iure Praedae Commentarius). The second dating places the genesis of the manuscrbipt around 1613-1615.
In the context of Grotius’ writings, the Theses LVI assume an important position for several reasons: They raise questions about state formation, the duty of citizens to the state and the right of political resistance in far greater detail than in any other work of the celebrated Dutch humanist. The Theses LVI also feature important reading notes that yield priceless insights into the sources that Grotius directly consulted and their influence on his ideas. The manuscript grants modern scholars a unique glimpse into the working mind of its author. Evidence points not only to the ferocious haste with which Grotius wrote his works, but also the occasional sloppiness of his reading and research habits."""

This article is an ‘emotional’ intervention in the field of early Soviet legal history: it provides a theoretical background on the role of emotions in early Soviet legal thought and practice. After sketching the wider context necessary for an understanding of emotions in the specific setting of the courtroom, it charts three possible directions for applying the history of emotions framework to early Soviet criminal law and gives examples for each of them. It shows the influence of emotions on the administration of justice as well as discrepancies between the writings of legal scholars and the actual implementation of the new legal model. Finally, it discusses these findings in the context of early Soviet ideas about the malleability and perfectibility of human nature, the emergence of the new Soviet person, and the transformation of the deviant and the social order.

The current debate about historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)—whether these colleges
are needed in a society that “seeks” equality—is not new but is the product of a continuing controversy that dates back to
the close of the Civil War. Since then, each landmark in the history of HBCUs has occasioned renewed discussions of the role of these colleges, with implications for the role of Blacks in society. This article will examine the legal and social forces that have had an impact on the development of HBCUs. In exploring this history, the authors will employ Derrick Bell’s notion that most Whites will only accommodate the interests of Blacks in achieving racial equality when it is in the best interest of middle- and upperclass Whites—interest convergence. This study is historical in nature, drawing on legal cases, archival documents, legislative decisions, and past research related to the funding, classification, and state of HBCUs. The authors found that in all but a few cases, legal court decisions, laws, acts, and state and federal decisions as they pertain to HBCUs also had intentional or unintentional benefits for White students and historically White institutions.

According to the Italian 1865 civil code, the father (or the mother) were liable for the torts of minor children living with them, unless they proved that they could not prevent the wrongful act. Like in France, in this system, liability was based on a presumption of fault, which could be rebutted by evidence to the contrary. This paper analyses the way in which exculpatory proof was interpreted by the Italian courts during the time the 1865 civil code was in force. Starting in the period following the Unification of Italy, the tradition laid the foundations of longstanding arguments thanks to some interpretative choices whose repercussions lasted well beyond the first Italian civil code. However, to this day there is still no historical analysis of the decisions taken by the courts. The most typical situations of parental civil liability are examined, together with the lines of defence allowed by the judges. Following a widespread line of orientation in case law, the courts considered the parents liable for negligence both in supervising and in educating the child. From the analysis of the cases it emerges that the courts judged the parents according to a series of parameters, such as the nature of the tort, the child’s character and temperament, the existence of specific reasons for suspicion, and age. The cases show that the post-Unification experience in Italy was more varied and better developed than is commonly thought. Tendencies denoting extreme strictness in claiming the parents were negligent, for instance, when children committed intentional crimes and were generally ill-natured, or when they rode bicycles or motor vehicles, co-existed with more liberal perspectives, which allowed for the parents’ exemption from liabilities by concretely assessing negligence in a more flexible and balanced way, especially when the children were close to the age of majority.

In recent decades, archaeological discourse has expanded beyond earlier paradigms concerned primarily with chronology, typology, and function. Archaeologies of gender, the body, the household, childhood, ritual, magic, and sexuality, among others, have merged with more traditional interests in social processes, cultural evolution, adaptation, subsistence change, and migration, among others, to create increasingly nuanced, speculative, controversial, and hopefully more holistic, understandings of the past as it is materialized and understood in the present through the archaeological record. Yet, in a field that appears to have almost as many subspecialties as it has practitioners, the archaeology of law, legal culture, and legal practice has been almost entirely overlooked. While many books have been written since the nineteenth century on ancient legal texts recovered from archaeological sites, known through classical literature, or documented as practice in early colonial sources, it is nearly impossible to find any books that use archaeological data as the material evidence from which to examine the nature of law in past societies, its variability in space and time, or its roles in supporting or subordinating the various agents, actors, factions, and classes that constituted the societies of the past that we study today. Looking at the archaeological records of historic, proto-historic and ethnographically described societies represents a first step towards building an understanding of the archaeological correlates of law and legal practice. We suggest that gaining an appreciation of variability and similarities in legal practice and concerns across time and space is crucial and that such an understanding will provide a unique, yet largely untapped, perspective on human behaviour. We argue that if we are to build a resilient and meaningful archaeology of law with the potential to challenge or expand our understanding of law and legal practice, we must investigate realms beyond the written record to examine undocumented societies on the global scale. In doing so, we may learn not only ‘what it’s like to be the bad man’, but also how the creation, recreation and practice of law affected and reflected individual actions, social processes of change and stasis, and myriad symbolic understandings of the world through which law and order, resistance and rebellion have been created, legitimated and contested.

The essay investigates the impact of the premature death of the father on brother and sister groups in noble Roman families of the seventeenth century. More specifically, it explores how this loss reflected on the biographical itineraries of individual members of the sibling unit; how relations between the orphans were reformulated according to order of birth and firstborn or cadet status, age and sex; and what forms of solidarity and competition were engendered by the loss of a father. Since demographic historians have shown that the state of being orphaned at an early age is an important variable, the author argues that it cannot be overlooked – as historians have done so far – in studies on family relations, and especially when reconstructing childhood and adolescent experiences. The author's investigation is mainly based on sources (letters, guardianship memorandums, account books and other items) from the archives of the families selected for examination. These documents bear witness to the strength of kinship relationships, which provide support to the orphans during their lives, and also to the role of proximity vs. distance in the evolution of inter-sibling bonds.

Indonesia has been home to some of the most vibrant and complex developments in modern Islamic thought anywhere in the world. Nevertheless little is known or understood about these developments outside South East Asia. By considering the work of the leading Indonesian thinkers of the twentieth century, Michael Feener, an intellectual authority in the area, offers a cogent critique of this diverse and extensive literature and sheds light on the contemporary debates and the dynamics of Islamic reform. The 2007 book highlights the openness to, and creative manipulation of, diverse strands of international thought that have come to define Islamic intellectualism in modern Indonesia. This is an accessible and interpretive overview of the religious and social thought of the world's largest Muslim majority nation. As such it will be read by scholars of Islamic law and society, South East Asian studies and comparative law and jurisprudence.

Da quando Guido Calogero e Piero Calamandrei, scrivendo nel clima fosco della dittatura, vi dedicarono pagine mirabili per profondità e lucidità dell'analisi (Calogero 1937: 128;; Calamandrei 1939: 105), la questione del rapporto tra giudice e storico ha assunto una straordinaria rilevanza teorica e pratica. In particolare, molte riflessioni recenti si sono appuntate sulle intersezioni tra verità storica e verità giudiziaria, indagate sia nei loro profili di teoria generale, sia nelle loro specifiche applicazioni Thomas 1998: 17; Stolleis 2000: 173; Borrello 2011: 13). Un siffatto ritorno d'interesse per un tema classico, qual è quello della relazione tra ius dicere e storiografia, non è casuale né sorprendente, ma si inscrive con coerenza all'interno di un fenomeno tra i più significativi dell'esperienza contemporanea: il fenomeno della "giuridificazione" della storia.

This essay analyzes the gradual process of criminal reform in the territories that would form Argentina throughout the 19th century. After the independence and in spite of different attempts for establishing a new republican system, the reform of the criminal laws did not have the revolutionary pace that one could expect. The Spanish colonial law persisted during the first half of the 19th century.
The first national penal code was enacted in 1886, two decades after the constitutional organization of the country (1853–1860). We will describe the process of coding the criminal law, paying attention to the inherent complexity derived from the hybridism of the Argentinean constitutional model (half Federal, half Unitarian). In order to get a better comprehension of the way in which actors of the time understood the codification process, we will look at the archives, focusing our view in the experience of the Province of Cordoba, the second district in
population and territory of the country. These primary sources help us to understand the way in which the daily justice administration gradually encompassed the codification process. Finally, we cast some doubts about the efficacy of the first national penal code for achieving the sought after legal uniformity.

The text presents a historical analysis to the limits of the full popular sovereignty in the United States from the Independence to the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the active role of the Supreme Court as an opponent to the expansion of the North-American democracy. The vigorous efforts of the Supreme Court in order to extend the warrants of the slave owner’s rights before the Civil War reveal how strong the same Court repelled the recognition of fundamental rights incorporated to the Constitution by the 13th and 14th Amendments after the Civil War, transfiguring the “Everyman’s Constitution” speech into the reality of the “Inverted Constitution”.

During the 18th century, an increasingly strong individualistic attitude in the way of understanding the relationship between man and the tangible world spread throughout Europe. The legal institution which, more than any other, suffered from the effects of this reductionism was the Property as victim of incredible compression in comparison to medieval world. The exclusive model that the new Enlightenment and the bourgeois mentality wanted to adopt was the individual Property, to the detriment of all those forms of possession documented in the Middle Ages. The present study intends to investigate, in the geographical context of the Papal States, the great juridical dispute between the individualistic model – endorsed by the Sacred Legislator – and that of a collectivistic nature defended by the Community.

Historians and anthropologists are confronted with a persistent problem for which there is no clear solution: the conceptual tools which we use to attempt to understand cultures are themselves products of (often) the very cultures we are attempting to understand.  Take “religion”.  Daniel Boyarin (2004) has argued that the very concept of “religion” as we know it was a product of the fourth and fifth centuries, as bishops and emperors constructed Christianity as a religion (the true one, of course), and in counterdistinction constructed “Judaism” and “Hellenism” (or paganism) as “false” religions.  For Boyarin, Judaism only becomes a “religion” when Christian authorities define it as one.  The same could be said for the jumble of texts, beliefs and rituals that the English, upon arriving in India, lump together under the name “Hinduism”, which they turn into a religion. Building, defining and policing borders between confessional groups has been an important part of constructing identities—or visions of community—in various societies, in particular those ruled by Christians or Muslims, from the time of the fourth-century Christian Roman emperors.  What did one have to do to be considered belonging to the “true” or dominant religious community: what doctrines, institutional affiliations, or ritual performances were necessary?  How were other religions defined as separate and legitimate?  What to do with those who seemed to fit in no category of accepted religion: the realm of syncretists and heretics? In this article, I examine how Christian and Muslim jurists of the fourth to eleventh centuries use law to define and police confessional boundaries, in particular how they attempt to limit interactions that could transgress or blur those boundaries: shared meals, sexual contact, syncretic practices.

The paper argues that the introduction of bureaucracy civilized death penalty and brutal punishment. The study bases on a quantitative analysis of the numbers of death sentences and executions in England and Habsburg Austria from 1700 to 1914 and on a qualitative analysis of historical literature about the death penalty in both countries. The paper shows that professional law enforcement specialists, bureaucrats, civil servants, and detached juridical stuff formed a new class of “domesticated middlemen elites”. In strong states, this new class becomes the dominating group. In weak states, however, old elites that combine economic and political power preserve their privileged positions. For them capital punishment is the most proper mean to deter criminals because old elites fear the alternative: the introduction of strong-state institutions. Beside obvious power struggles between central and local elites—which effects penal policy pro and con capital punishment—there is a civilizing process going beneath the surface of rationality and political interests. In strong states, the formation of a “habitus” averse to brutal punishment is initiated amongst “domesticated middlemen elites” who are acting in peaceful living- and working conditions.

This paper studies a group of documents produced in the course of investigation into the activities of a gang that operated in Uruk in the latter part of Nabonidus’ rule. It examines the composition of this criminal group and the offences committed by its members. Above all, however, it seeks to reconstruct the procedures implemented by the temple officials in response to a hitherto unpublished royal writ BM 114574, a document that throws new light on the involvement of the king in the administration of justice in the Neo-Babylonian period.

This paper focuses on the exegetical interpretation of Luke's narrative on the census (or registration) carried out at the time of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:1-5). After some quick remarks on the juridical institution of the census (the so called professio census) in ancient Rome, a selection of the exegetical interpretations of this pericope developed by various ancient and medieval authors is presented. Origen, Ambrose, Orosius, Bede and Bonaventure are discussed, among others. A number of medieval authors, as Dante Alighieri and Bartolomeus of Saxoferrato, are also referred to. The analysis is meant to argue, on the one hand, that a spiritualisation of the institution of the census occurred and led to the spiritual empire of Christ replacing the temporal empire of Augustus; on the other, that the reference to this institution was used to legitimise political authority in the eyes of the believers. This interpretative tradition is thus shown to offer a vivid example of the close intertwining of theological and juridical concepts, and practices, which has characterised the relationship between the Church and Empire from the former's very beginning.

Abstract :
The 25th of August 1891 the workers of Elvetica, a mechanical factory of Milan, decided to call a strike. The protest expanded quickly in a few days and the 30 th of August the general strike of the Milanese mechanical labour force was declared. On order from the prefect, Giovanni Codronchi Argeli, more than 1500 soldiers were employed in public security duties. The prefectural documents, kept in the archive of Giovanni Codronchi Argeli in the municipal library of Imola, and those of the police headquarters of Milan, found in the Archivio di Stato of Milan, have given the author the opportunity to analyse the relationship between civil and military authorities. In fact, the collaboration between the Prefettura and the head of the III Corpo d'Armata was difficult and their disagreements often caused confusions and incomprehension.

Italiano: Il 25 agosto 1891 gli operai dello stabilimento Elvetica, officina meccanica di proprietà di Ernesto Breda, proclamarono lo sciopero. L'agitazione si estese in breve tempo e il 30 agosto venne proclamato lo sciopero generale di categoria. Su ordine del prefetto, Giovanni Codronchi Argeli, diverse compagnie della Divisione militare della città vennero impiegate in servizio di pubblica sicurezza. Entro la fine dello sciopero più di 1500 soldati avrebbero prestato servizio a Milano. L'analisi delle carte della Prefettura, conservate nell'archivio di Giovanni Codronchi Argeli presso la Biblioteca comunale di Imola, e della Questura, conservate presso l'Archivio di Stato di Milano, ha permesso all'autore di osservare da vicino, al livello delle pratiche concrete di impiego delle truppe in servizio di pubblica sicurezza, i rapporti tra autorità civili e autorità militari. Emerge il dissidio tra Prefettura e Comando del III Corpo d'Armata e una difficile collaborazione fatta, talvolta, di confusioni e incomprensioni.

This paper examines the legal institute of prescription as a mean to end slavery in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The research focused on “opressed freedom” lawsuits through which a person who was considered free could be enslaved or re-enslaved. To that end, a thorough look was directed at the argument of prescriptive extinction of captivity in the appeals stored at the Fundo de Relação do Rio de Janeiro, of the Brazilian National Archive. In addition, a survey has been conducted of the contemporary law, sentences and individual votes available at books and journals of the time. The main foundations of the judicial logic, as well as the motivation of both sides, plaintiffs or enslaved defendants, were carefully scrutinized. The interpretation was based on the vocabulary employed by the contending sides when framing their arguments on the object of the legal action. The goal was to bring to light the links between freedom and slavery in the judicial proceedings involving slaves, particularly the new meanings attributed to old body of law known as hermenêutica rule.

La obra de los inquisidores Kramer y Sprenger fue el manual de referencia para la Inquisición bajomedieval; estructurado en tres libros, el último de ellos está centrado en el proceso inquisitorial y ha sido, con mucha diferencia, el que menos atención ha recibido de los tres. En él juega un papel destacado el análisis de la participación procesal de los testigos, algo vital, puesto que la legislación establecía que bastaba el testimonio de dos hombres honestos para condenar a alguien como hereje.

"Studies on the family in medieval Castile have not paid enough
attention to relationships between family members. On the few occasions they have done so, the analysis has tended to focus
on a vertical approach; consequently, little effort has been made to comprehend the ties between brothers and sisters in the
Castilian Middle Ages. This paper aims to provide a closer look at this topic by means of an examination of Castilian royal legislation, trying to define the social content of brotherhood, as well as to reveal those fraternal liaisons concerning protection or conflict found in normative texts."

O presente artigo aborda o imaginário jurídico brasileiro no início da República Velha tomando como chave-interpretativa a insurreição popular do Arraial de Canudos. Utilizando como metodologia de interpretação das fontes a relação entre imaginação e direito, a análise de elementos da cultura jurídica no período e dos escritos de Antônio Conselheiro revela indícios da permanência, às portas do século XX, de um imaginário jurídico de fortes tendências pré-modernas.

The modern rationalist idea of rule of law, and modern rationalism in general, owes much to Plato and to Platonism. However, Plato's stance towards the laws of the city is all but clear. On the one hand, we have the seemingly 'totalitarian' Plato of the Republic, a dialogue which defends the absolute authority of philosophical wisdom over all prescriptions that are ensuing from existing cities and their laws. On the other hand, we have the 'more liberal-democratic' Plato of the Laws, a dialogue which promotes a combination of philosophical wisdom with rule of law. This ambivalence as to the issue of laws permeates one of the most enigmatic of Plato's works, the Politicus, a dialogue that was written after the Republic and before the Laws. The present essay rejects both the 'totalitarian' and the 'liberal-democratic' understanding of Plato's stance towards the laws of the city. The author defends the thesis that laws in the Politicus do not constitute a static Form that works against or with philosophical wisdom and/or democratic selflegislation, but a factor that generates a series of inescapable philosophical and political ambivalences. This approach corresponds with many of the findings of the so-called 'post-modern jurisprudence'. That is, it brings to the fore the immanent aporias of philosophical dialectics, it emphasises the irreducible un-decidability between violence and consent as foundational elements of the law, and it stresses the adiakrisia (our inability to discriminate) between the poisonous and the healing effects of laws as regards the attainment of conditions of social and political justice.

The turn to emotions-centred history has generated new interest in exploring the presence of emotions in legal sources. However, as legal sources were precisely crafted to meet legal requirements and jurisdictional issues, this is particularly challenging. Nevertheless, legal claims were informed by social norms, and this could include emotion. This article investigates the invocation of emotions like fear, anger, dread and sorrow in petitions made to the court of chancery. While the language of chancery petitions was informed by technical legal requirements, petitioners and counsel collaborated to make statements about emotions, often as a technique of persuasiveness to elicit sympathy. The recitation of emotion helped petitioners and counsel to account for actions and moral faults, as well as to censure someone’s character. This article explores the legitimacy of certain emotional language tropes in cases brought into chancery between 1480 and 1540.

Emblema de la conciencia y de la identidad galesa y campeón del Reino Unido imperial primer ministro británico, el último liberal, entre 1916 y 1922 y, por lo tanto, arquitecto de la Europa y del mundo nacidos en Versalles, porfiado adversario del movimiento irlandés durante la Guerra de Independencia y responsable del Tratado de Londres de 1921, la personalidad de David Lloyd George cobra nueva relevancia un siglo después del tiempo en el que, como dijo de él Winston Churchill, "en su mejor expresión, fue el mejor".

The aim of this paper is to examine the ‘regulatory intervention’ of Verdi’s fathers using several examples: Oberto Conte di San Bonifacio, protagonist of the composer’s first opera; the Doge Francesco Foscari of I due foscari (1844); Giorgio Germont, representative par excellence of the onstage exercise of autorité paternelle in La Traviata (1853); Amonasro, the king of Ethiopia from Aida (1871); and, last but not least, the troubled political leader Simon Boccanegra in the remake of the opera dated 1881.

Resumen La novela de Evelyn Retorno a Brideshead, publicada en 1945, analiza la transfor-mación institucional del Reino Unido desde una visión imperial a la fundación de su contemporáneo Estado social, con Charles Ryder y su asistente Hooper como símbolos de una nueva cultura política democrática: la cultura de los derechos sociales. Abstract Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, includes the institutional transformation of United Kingdom from an imperial conception to the build of a contemporary social State, with Charles Ryder and his assistant Hooper as the symbol of a new democratic political culture: the culture of social rights. Palabras claves Estado de Derecho. Estado Social. Democracia. Evelyn Waugh. Retorno a Brideshead.

"Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics.
In Land and Loyalty, Tomas Larsson argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes. Security concerns, he find, often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. While Larsson's extensive archival research findings are drawn from Thai sources, he situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Securitization and Institutional Development
2. Capitalizing Thailand
3. Weapon of a Weak State
4. Conserving Smallholder Society
5. Combating Specters and Communists
6. Old Solutions, New Challenges

PRESS REVIEWS

"In this excellent book, Tomas Larsson seeks to explain the origins of effective formal property rights to land in Thailand.... His highly original approach to the question is a model of concise, analytically-driven historical research ... Land and Loyalty makes an original and stimulating contribution not just to the understanding of land rights in Thailand but to much broader debates over political economy, development, and state formation. It makes a sophisticated set of arguments without sacrificing readability, and it is packed with fascinating historical detail."—Derek Hall, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia]

"I highly recommend Larsson’s book to both Thai experts and institutionalists. The book provides valuable insights into the causes and mechanisms of institutional change from the perspective of securitization."—Christine Ngoc Ngo, Journal of Agrarian Change 

"Is the rhetoric that 'farmers are the backbone of the Thai nation' still relevant today? Larsson offers a nuanced analysis of the emergence of the Thai state very much in conversation with recent critical scholarship examining how and why appeals to such rhetoric continue to legitimize the disparate work and goals of multiple state and non-state actors within Thailand. . . . While written for a broader political economy of development audience, the detailed archival work and innovative arguments mean that this book should be required reading for scholars with an interest in agrarian history as well as those with interest in the relationships between the Thai state and its ‘backbone.’"—Vanessa Lamb, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

"This book is well-written, clearly organized, and based on a hefty array of sources, including court and government documents. The nuanced argument is carefully traced throughout the book. The emphasis on perceived security concerns to fend off colonial, capitalist and communist threats is warranted. . . . I strongly recommend Land and Loyalty to scholars of property rights and state formation. This is a good book to think with."—Janet C. Sturgeon, Pacific Affairs

"This book is a valuable addition to the slight literature on land policy in Thailand. The narrative on the making of land policy extends significantly beyond earlier studies and has many new revelations. Larsson points up his arguments by comparisons with parallel cases in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines."—Chris Baker, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature

"With Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand, political scientist Tomas Larsson presents an original and provocative study on the historical origins of Thailand's property rights regime."—Keith Barney, Journal of Asian Studies

Este artículo estudia la instrumentalización de la lengua náhuatl por el Segundo Imperio Mexicano para controlar el territorio mexicano. Se plantea que el emperador Maximiliano se valió de la lengua náhuatl como una herramienta de dominio territorial. Para llevar a cabo esta investigación, se utilizó el modelo doctrinal de las tres dimensiones del poder para comprender las prácticas y el ejercicio del poder del emperador Maximilia-no en su imperio. La argumentación de esta tesis se sostiene en la dimensión del soberano como autoridad suprema.

ABSTRACT This article studies the instrumentalization of the Nahuatl language by the Second Mexican Empire to control the country's territory. It is argued that the Emperor Maximilian used the Nahuatl language as a tool for territorial control. In order to carry out this research, the doctrinal model of the three dimensions of the prince's power was used to understand the practices and exercise of power by Emperor Maximilian in his empire. The argumentation of this thesis is based on the dimension of the sovereign as supreme authority.

The English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) were incorporated by State charters two years apart, in 1600 and 1602 respectively. They were involved in similar business activities. They were both organized as joint stock corporations, with huge capital and hundreds of shareholders. The formation of the companies was situated in a crucial junction in the history of business organizations and stock markets. Yet, while the formation of the VOC led to the appearance of a secondary market in shares in the Dutch Republic, in England a share market emerged only a century after the organization of the EIC. The present article shall focus on a main organizational challenge faced by the two companies, the facilitation of long-term impersonal cooperation between active entrepreneurs and passive investors. It will study the manners by which legal and political environmental factors were translated into the detailed financial and governance structure of each of the two companies. It will explain the distinct English and Dutch paths to the creation of share markets through these environmental and organizational differences.My approach and case study will be encountered with three influential, theoretically oriented, approaches to the relationship between law and institutions and the development of the stock market. The approaches are those of Schleifer and his collaborators that emphasize the effect of legal origins on investor protection, of North and Weingast that view the ability of the State to convey credible commitments as a key to the development of stock markets and of Rajan and Zingales that focus on market infrastructure and on the power of social and interest groups. The purpose of this encounter is twofold; first, to enrich our understanding of the reasons for the historical divergence between the two countries; and second, to analyze these leading theories in light of the empirical findings of our pivotal case study.

Contested Monarchy reappraises the wide-ranging and lasting transformation of the Roman monarchy between the Principate and Late Antiquity. The book takes as its focus the century from Diocletian to Theodosius I (284–395), a period during which the stability of monarchical rule depended heavily on the emperor’s mobility, on collegial or dynastic rule, and on the military resolution of internal political crises. At the same time, profound religious changes modified the premises of political interaction and symbolic communication between the emperor and his subjects, and administrative and military readjustments changed the institutional foundations of the Roman monarchy. This volume concentrates on the measures taken by emperors of this period to cope with the changing framework of their rule. The collection examines monarchy along three distinct yet intertwined fields: Administering the Empire, Performing the Monarchy, and Balancing Religious Change. Each field possesses its own historiography and methodology, and accordingly has usually been treated separately. This volume’s multifaceted approach builds on recent scholarship and trends to examine imperial rule in a more integrated fashion. With new work from a wide range of international scholars, Contested Monarchy offers a fresh survey of the role of the Roman monarchy in a period of significant and enduring change. // – – –

“This exceptionally valuable book offers multiple perspectives on the development of the institutional, ideological and religious aspects of the Roman empire’s first Christian century. Breaking away from traditional divisions according to dynasty or religion, we see how the Roman state developed new answers to the central question of its own legitimacy. Eschewing simplistic generalizations, the diverse contributions offer multiple perspectives on the way the Roman system of government interacted with its subjects. Wienand has performed an invaluable service by facilitating a wide ranging encounter among scholarly styles to promote a well-articulated discussion of significant themes in the governance of the Roman Empire, illuminating not only the period under consideration, but earlier and later periods as well.”
—David Potter, University of Michigan

Reviews

Journal of Roman Studies 106 (2016), 361-363 [Alexander Skinner]; Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.11.34 [Jan Willem Drijvers]; Sehepunkte 15 (2015) Nr. 11 [Adrastos Omissi]; H-Soz-Kult 18.5.2015 [Raphael Brendel]

Reviewers Quotes:

"This is a book that deepens our sense of the complexity, and unexpectedness, of the late Roman Empire. It is a landmark."
—Alexander Skinner

"Contested Monarchy is an enormously valuable volume without a weak link in its chain of articles. It is a must have for any scholar working on late Roman political, social, or religious history and for the library of any university that offers courses on the fourth century. Its depth of inquiry and range of coverage means that it will be of great value to researchers but the articles are all sufficiently accessible that advanced students will be able to gain much from them as well. The articles can be read individually, but the volume repays reading as a whole."
—Adrastos Omissi

"This is a fine collection of articles articulating the contested Roman imperial rule of late antiquity. Everybody interested in the late Roman empire will profit from it."
—Jan Willem Drijvers

CONTENTS

<Introduction>
1. Johannes Wienand: "The Cloak of Power: Dressing and Undressing the King"

<Part One: Administering the Empire>
2. John Weisweiler: "Domesticating the Senatorial Elite: Universal Monarchy and Transregional Aristocracy in the Fourth Century AD"
3. John Noël Dillon: "The Inflation of Rank and Privilege: Regulating Precedence in the Fourth Century AD"
4. Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner: "Ostentatious Legislation: Law and Dynastic Change, AD 364–365"
5. Doug Lee: "Emperors and Generals in the Fourth Century"
6. Joachim Szidat: "Gaul and the Roman Emperors of the Fourth Century"
7. Michael Kulikowski: "Regional Dynasties and Imperial Court"

<Part Two: Performing the Monarchy>
8. Mark Humphries: "Emperors, Usurpers, and the City of Rome: Performing Power from Diocletian to Theodosius"
9. Johannes Wienand: "O tandem felix civili, Roma, victoria! Civil-War Triumphs from Honorius to Constantine and Back"
10. Hartmut Leppin: "Coping with the Tyrant’s Faction: Civil-War Amnesties and Christian Discourses in the Fourth Century AD"
11. Christopher Kelly: "Pliny and Pacatus: Past and Present in Imperial Panegyric"
12. Henning Börm: "Born to Be Emperor: The Principle of Succession and the Roman Monarchy"
13. Christian Reitzenstein-Ronning: "Performing Justice: The Penal Code of Constantine the Great"

<Part Three: Balancing Religious Change>
14. Harold Drake: "Speaking of Power: Christian Redefinition of the Imperial Role in the Fourth Century"
15. Bruno Bleckmann: "Constantine, Rome, and the Christians"
16. Noel Lenski: "Constantine and the Tyche of Constantinople"
17. Steffen Diefenbach: "A Vain Quest for Unity: Creeds and Political (Dis)Integration in the Reign of Constantius II"
18. Johannes Hahn: "The Challenge of Religious Violence: Imperial Ideology and Policy in the Fourth Century"
19. Rita Lizzi Testa: "The Famous ‘Altar of Victory Controversy’ in Rome: The Impact of Christianity at the End of the Fourth Century"

<Epilogue>
20. Johannes Wienand: "The Empire’s Golden Shade: Icons of Sovereignty in an Age of Transition"

Historians are part of the existing world and in their intellectual endeavour they bring forward questions for past times that are derived from their present situation 2. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CRIME AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE: NEW WINE IN OLD FLASKS T he historiography of the variety of subjects which are grouped under the generic term «History of Crime and Criminal Justice» is not easy to unravel. As a relatively new area of history, this subdiscipline does not have any longesta blished tradition, nor any institutional points of reference, nor any specialised research implements at its disposal. The first organised study group to appear in the area was the Nederlandse Werkgroep Strafrechtgeschiedenis, founded in 1973 notably by Herman Diederiks. The group organised two international meetings in 1977 in Amsterdam and Leiden devoted to the history of crime 3 , and another at the Economic and Social History Conference in Edinburgh in 1978 4. Following on from these, the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice was established as became the first regular meeting point of researchers who until then had been dis persed in various branches of history as well as combining institutional and legal, economic and social, political, anthropological and cultural, with the practices of other researchers in the social sciences (jurists, criminologists, sociologists, anthro pologists). Between 1978 and 1995, the association organised a number of «inter continental» conferences and about twenty thematic colloquia, which mainly took place, most appropriately, at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. They also began publishing a Newsletter in 1972, subsequently called the Bulletin 5 .

Resumen La República de Weimar encierra la histórica creación de una nueva solución políti-ca con instituciones democráticas y el pleno desarrollo de los derechos humanos y sociales. Berlín se convirtió, junto con Viena, en el centro mundial de la creación artística y cultural. Noviembre de 1918, de Alfred Döblin, muestra una brillante visión de la edificación de la República tras la quiebra de la Alemania imperial, y de un Estado de Derecho que hace frete al autoritarismo. Palabras clave Estado de Derecho. Democracia. Derechos sociales. Creación cultural. Abstract Weimar Germany represents the historical creation of a new political solution with democratic institutions, and full development of human and social rights. Moreover, Berlin became, alongside with Vienna, the world centre of arts and cultural creativity. Alfred Döblin's November 1918 shows a brilliant vision of the rose of the Re

Este texto tem por objetivo trazer ao leitor breves apontamentos sobre a construção de quatro paradigmas históricos vinculados à doutrina do constitucionalismo. Neste sentido, inicia-se com a apresentação das principais características que definem a constituição antiga (greco-romana). Em seguida parte-se para a apresentação do paradigma medieval, momento em que são apontadas as principais características do que seria o constitucionalismo da época. Posteriormente aborda-se o surgimento do estado moderno em seus dois momentos – o absolutista e o liberal, sendo este último visto como o terceiro paradigma constitucionalista. Por fim, mas ainda no âmbito dos paradigmas, é descrito aquele que na atualidade é chamado de neoconstitucionalismo. Uma vez apresentadas as definições destes paradigmas, parte-se para a argumentação acerca da mudança na forma como a hermenêutica jurídica funciona, ampliando sua esfera de atuação e seus métodos para transformar a Constituição em ponto- chave do ordenamento jurídico.

The research analyzes different models of marginality in historical-legal and political-legal contexts. The relevance of the study is due to the significant risks of spreading marginality in modern society, as a prerequisite for legal anomia. Understanding marginality, as one of the destructive forms of legal awareness and legally significant limiting behavior, allows marginality to be modeled historically and theoretically in relation to sociocultural phenomena such as state and law. At the methodological level, documentary design was used close to historical research and epistemological reflection typical of interdisciplinary dialogue. It is concluded that the use of legal means and techniques to combat marginality is based on the hypothesis of legal consciousness, according to which anyone initially focuses on consciousness, socially active and useful, and therefore on lawful behavior established by law. This approach can be formed, strengthened, or restored through the implementation of educational, ideological, and other functions of law, political science, or history.

Based on research in the archives of the Soviet penal camp system, this article addresses the phenomenon of corruption among officials of the Gulag in the period between 1945 and 1953. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversaw the camp system, treated corruption as a harmful and dangerous phenomenon that was unacceptably pervasive. The article investigates the varieties and frequency of corrupt activities among camp officials, including bribery, theft of state property, participation in illegal markets and speculation, and embezzlement. Gulag authorities’ anti-corruption efforts included inspections, audits, and a large network of prisoner–informants. These anti-corruption campaigns were largely ineffective. The article concludes that corruption existed in significant quantities inside the camp system, and that the forms it took were largely the same as those pervasive in the wider Soviet society.

Many mothers in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cape Town produced prenuptial or out-of-wedlock children. Yet little is known of either the mothers or their bastards; due not to a lack of sources, but to the neglect gender and family history has suffered in colonial South African historiography. Because of this neglect, I propose to address in this exploratory article some of the issues raised by illegitimacy and to present some of the sources that are available to historians. This I do by concentrating on the legal framework: illegitimacy is first of all a legal and not primarily a moral category. Who were the parents of illegitimate children and what sort of sexual relations resulted in their birth? How did the specific social conditions at the Cape impact on the different types of relations that existed between men and women? And, above all, how was this regulated – what was the impact of family law on the relations between parents and the status of their children? A further question – albeit one which can be dealt with less fully due to the restrictions of the archival record – is what happened to such children. Were they allowed to live? What provisions were made for them, and what was the legal impact of their status as bastards? In spite of the legal focus of this article, it must be remembered that the way in which the law was interpreted and enforced at the Cape of Good Hope was influenced by the social contexts of both early modern Europe and the society which developed here during the Dutch period.